Dave Maass

Dave Maass

Senior Investigative Researcher

As EFF's senior investigative researcher, Dave Maass is a muckraker/noisemaker, covering issues related to police surveillance, free speech, transparency, and government accountability. In addition to leading deep-dive investigations, Dave coordinates large-scale public records campaigns, advocates on state legislation, and compiles The Foilies, EFF's annual tongue-in-cheek awards for outrageous responses to FOIA requests. He sometimes represents EFF in digital rights-themed cosplay at Dragon Con, and he edited EFF's first science fiction collection, Pwning Tomorrow. He also researches virtual reality as part of the team that developed Spot the Surveillance, EFF's first VR experience. Contact him with questions or information on police technology (e.g. automated license plate readers, biometric identification), prisoner rights, or public records laws.

Dave is currently Visiting Professor of Media Technology at the University of Nevada, Reno Reynolds School of Journalism.

Before joining EFF, Dave wrote for alt weeklies in every state along the southern border, reporting on everything from Texas death row to San Diego Comic-Con. He has moderated dark-horse presidential debates on public access TV; organized digital media on barely legal road rallies; performed spoken word on a British art-rock tour, and revealed human-rights abuses in Ghanaian refugee camps. His political investigations uncovered embezzlement that ultimately put a New Mexico elected official behind bars and misconduct resulting in the severe censure and fines levied against a San Diego County Superior Court Judge. His work on incarceration has been used to support civil rights lawsuits, detention system reform, and state legislation.

His investigative reporting on incarceration in San Diego County was honored with the Youth Law Center's Loren Warboys Unsung Hero Award and the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement's Contribution to Oversight Award. He has also won top honors from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia and the Society of Professional Journalists San Diego Chapter. In 2017, Dave was a recipient of the First Amendment Coalition's Free Speech and Open Government Award alongside EFF Senior Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch and the ACLU of Southern California's Director of Police Practices Peter Bibring. He also served on the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance Task Force from 2016-2018.

Deeplinks Posts by Dave

As the year draws to a close, so has EFF’s long-running Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Drug Enforcement Agency about the mass phone surveillance program infamously known as “Hemisphere.” We won our case and freed up tons of records. (So did the Electronic Privacy Information...

The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office had drones at the ready on the scene for many high-profile protests in Berkeley and on the University of California Berkeley campus throughout 2017. Just to the north, the Contra Costa County Sheriff deployed drones over immigrant rights rallies outside the West County Detention Facility...

The Sacramento County’s Department of Human Assistance (DHA) is terminating its invasive automated license plate reader (ALPR) program, following an EFF investigation that found the agency was accessing driver data to investigate welfare recipients without enacting the basic civil liberties safeguards required by California law. Over the last...

Deadline extended until 11:59 p.m. PT on January 6, 2019! EFF is now accepting nominations for The Foilies 2019, our fifth annual “anti-awards” program for government agencies that, whether by maliciousness or incompetence, interfere with the right to access public information. It’s a tongue-in-cheek affair celebrating Sunshine Week (March...

EFF and MuckRock have filed hundreds of public records requests with law enforcement agencies around the country to reveal how data collected from automated license plate readers (ALPR) is used to track the travel patterns of drivers. We focused exclusively on departments that contract with surveillance vendor Vigilant Solutions to...

Despite igniting controversy over ethical lapses and the threat to civil liberties posed by its tattoo recognition experiments the first time around, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently completed its second major project evaluating software designed to reveal who we are and potentially what we believe based...

For 20 years, McSweeney’s has been the first name (or last name, actually) in emerging short fiction. But this November, McSweeney’s will debut the first all-non-fiction issue of Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern: “The End of Trust” (Issue 54) is a collection of essays and interviews focusing on issues related...

California Gov. Jerry Brown has a signed a bill into law that opens up the Internet for youth in state care. With A.B. 2448, California now requires that all youth in juvenile hall be granted access to the Internet for educational purposes. Meanwhile youth in foster care are...

Facebook has a problem: an infestation of undercover cops. Despite the social platform’s explicit rules that the use of fake profiles by anyone—police included—is a violation of terms of service, the issue proliferates. While the scope is difficult to measure, EFF has identified scores of agencies who maintain policies that...

Here’s the not-so-secret recipe for strong passphrases: a random element like dice, a long list of words, and math. And as long as you have the first two, the third takes care of itself. All together, this adds up to diceware, a simple but powerful method to create...